With most online business owners now investing monthly budgets on Adwords, it’s staggering that so many are making fundamental errors when it comes to their monthly campaign budgets. In this article we are going to take a look at some of the key reasons your campaign might be leaking cash unnecessarily.
Poor Landing Pages
When you take visitors from Google to your website, how does the page look you are landing them on? Is the page specific to the target audience or is it too brief or too vague? Lets take an example of a simple campaign advertising “airport transfers”.
80% Of your clicks might relate to people looking for airport transfers from Heathrow. However, your landing pages makes no mention of Heathrow; it is a general page about your airport transfer services. This has several knock on effects;
1. The qualty score of your adverts will be less than they should when people type in “airport transfer from Heathrow”, which means your adverts are costing more than they should.
2. The page on your site will have a reduced conversion rate because your visitors will not be seeing exactly what they want when they land on your site.
The solution…. split your campaign so that users land on pages more specific to them. In our example, we would advise creating a unique landing page for “Heathrow Airport Transfers”. This would reduce the cost per click, and it would provide your potential customers with exactly what they are looking for the instant they land on your website.
Irrelevant Keywords
It is important with any campaign to continuously monitor your traffic, and to make sure your are not paying good money for bad traffic. Within any campaign you can see which keywords you are paying for, and this is something you should monitor extremely carefully.
Lets look at an example of a company selling “management training”. By analysing their campaign we might determine that they are spending several hundred pounds per month on keyword which relate to “free” training. With no buying intent, these searches represent an extremely low chance of converting into a sale, and thus should be excluded from the campaign in order to fund better performing keywords.
Over time, these types of keywords creep into campaigns and can become a significant drain on budgets. Negative keywords should be added whenever they become apparent, in order to maximize your spend.
High Bounces
By using Google Analytics, you can very closely monitor how traffic is performing on your website. You can narrow these down to individual Adword campaigns, giving you a homed in view of how your paid traffic is interacting with each page of your website.
The bounce rate is the most important metric. A bounce rate of 100% means that everyone who landed on that particular page, left your site instantly. i.e they had zero chance of converting into a sale.
By calculating the site average bounce rate, you can start to determine if certain pages of your site have an above average bounce rate, and are wasting funds from your Adwords budget.
For example, we recently identified a client’s Adwords budget was presenting a 90% bounce on a certain page of their website. This was caused by an out of stock product. The product could easily be restocked, or the page excluded from their campaign, saving valuable funds towards better performing landing pages.
Summary
Monitoring your traffic every day, week and month is imperative to running an Adwords campaign. This means looking closely at both Adwords, and Google Analytics to ensure that every pound spent represents a potential lead or sale.